The federal government collected approximately $2,468,827,000,000 in tax receipts in the first nine months of fiscal 2016 (October through June), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today. Unlike May, when the federal government set a record for inflation-adjusted tax revenues collected in the first eight months of a fiscal year, the federal taxes collected through June did not set a record for inflation-adjusted tax revenues in the first nine months of a fiscal year. While bringing in $2,468,827,000,000 in tax revenues during the first nine months of fiscal 2016, the federal government spent approximately $2,869,674,000,000—running a deficit of $400,847,000,000....

President Barack Obama responded to reports of slow job growth Friday by blaming Republicans who have opposed parts of his economic agenda. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report found the economy added 242,000 new jobs in February. The latest number highlights a long-running trend of slow, yet positive, economic growth. Obama credits the growth to his agenda but its slowness to Republicans for their opposition to his plan. “The plans that we have put in place to grow the economy have worked,” the president declared in the Oval Office. “They would work even faster if we did not have...

When you were a rowdy teen, your parents were the Establishment. Now that you're a parent, what are you? The anti-establishment, cool parent? Not likely. Rather, you're a grownup who tries to keep the peace in your discordant household; who tries to negotiate among self-interested, imperfect family members who have competing goods and goals; and who tries to instill a long-range vision for the future in your desire-ridden family who wants instant self-gratification. Welcome to the Establishment. You're a bona fide member now. Here's a defense of the amorphous, notional Establishment, as I see it, if it even exists in...

House Speaker Paul Ryan called on Republicans Wednesday to stop fighting angrily among themselves and not to be distracted by guns or other "hot-button" issues that President Barack Obama raises this election year. "We can't fall into the progressives' trap of acting like angry reactionaries," Ryan, R-Wis., said at a Heritage Action for America policy meeting. "The left would love nothing more than for a fragmented conservative movement to stand in a circular firing squad, so the progressives can win by default." ...

Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, says he came to Washington to cut spending, not add to the deficits and debt that will crush future generations. He spoke on Thursday, one day after House leaders, working with the White House, produced a $1.1 trillion spending bill. And Brat warned of worse to come. ...

The 2,009 page fiscal 2016 spending deal that the Republican House leadership released today authorizes $1,205,146,000,000 in federal outlays between now and the end of fiscal 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and it does not prohibit funding of Planned Parenthood, according to the House Appropriations Committee. The spending bill is paired with a separate 233-page tax bill. â€śWe are maintaining all of our pro-life protections, including the Hyde Amendment, and we are making cuts to the UNFPA program,â€ť House Speaker Paul Ryan said of the omnibus spending bill at a press conference today. Planned Parenthood is the nationâ€™s...

American businesses are borrowing at historic high levels, but the only thing growing as a result is how fast their equity capital is vanishing, according to David Stockman, White House budget chief during the Reagan administration. Stockman blamed the Fed and the Fed's Wall Street cheerleaders. He said the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned by nine times since 2000, yet real net investment in the business sector has cratered by 33 percent during the same time period. “Once upon a time businesses borrowed long term money — if they borrowed at all — in order to fund plant, equipment and...

Last week was a bad one for the US dollar, but good for stocks. The greenback had its worst five days of trading in four years, but the Dow rose another 168 points on Friday. This action took place after Madame Janet Yellen, proprietress of the House of the Rising Stockmarket, said she would not be impatient about raising rates. She would not be patient either, she warned. Investors drew the obvious conclusion: She has no idea what she is doing. […] The world of today is not the same world it was 50 years ago. We have a new...

House Democrats have unveiled a $3.7 trillion budget plan for next year. It mirrors President Barack Obama’s call for $1.8 trillion in tax increases on wealthier people and corporations over the coming decade but would add almost $6 trillion to the national debt over that time. […] The plan calls for a wave of new spending for infrastructure like roads and bridges and additional funding for education and medical research. It would make modest curbs on the rapid growth of the popular Medicare program. …

Declaring an end to “mindless austerity,” President Barack Obama called for a surge in government spending Thursday, and asked Congress to throw out the sweeping budget cuts both parties agreed to four years ago when deficits were spiraling out of control. Obama’s proposed $74 billion in added spending—about 7 percent—would be split about evenly between defense programs and the domestic side of the budget. Although he’s sought before to reverse the “sequester” spending cuts, Obama’s pitch in this year’s budget comes with the added oomph of an improving economy and big recent declines in federal deficits. Taking a defiant tone,...

House Republican appropriators say they will follow the two-year budget deal reached after the 2013 government shutdown regardless of who wins control of the Senate in November’s elections. Winning the Senate would give the GOP more leverage in spending fights with the administration, but GOP lawmakers have signaled they don't want to open a new bruising war over spending by rolling back the 2013 budget deal, in which Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) agreed to spending caps for the government for the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years. On the cusp of an election that could deliver...

Write Down This Date: July 1st, 2014 On this date, U.S. House of Representatives Bill "H.R. 2847" goes into effect. It will usher in the true collapse of the U.S. dollar, and will make millions of Americans poorer, overnight. You now have just several months to prepare ... Snopes Opinion: Mixture of Truth & NonTruth Origins: This item about the passage of H.R. 2847 causing the U.S. dollar to collapse as of 1 July 2014 is another example financial scarelore put out in conjunction with an investment come-on, in this case an ominous sales pitch put out by the folks...

One of European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s most important duties is watching his mouth. One ill-considered utterance is enough to sow panic on the financial markets. But during a press conference earlier this month, Draghi allowed himself a telling slip. Speaking to gathered journalists at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Draghi twice almost uttered a word he has been at pains to avoid. “Defla…”, Draghi began, before stopping himself and continuing with the term “low inflation.”Yet despite Draghi’s efforts, the specter of deflation was omnipresent in Washington during the meetings. And it...

President Obama has nominated Janet Yellen to be the next Federal Reserve Chairman. We need to know what she stands for if we want to predict what the central bank will do to us next. Clearly, Yellen will continue Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing, but her papers and speeches show that she is quite different from her predecessor. … … Yellen is all central planner. She gets her ideas, not from Friedman, but from John Maynard Keynes. Keynes did not trust markets, preferring government intervention. His prescribed solution to recession and unemployment is for the government to increase spending and the central...

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, says that if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on a budget with significant spending cuts, “spending just keeps going up in an uninterrupted fashion as far as the eye can see. By 2016, all you can see is unending red ink.” He added that he has little confidence that the congressional budget committee meeting officially for just the second time on Wednesday will be able to agree on a budget for the rest of the fiscal year that puts the federal government on an economically sustainable course by...

In kicking the proverbial can down the road, Congressional leaders acquiesced to the demand that wealthier Americans pay higher taxes. The higher taxes came in the form of a higher maximum tax rate on those individuals making more than $400,000 and the loss of the favorable tax treatment accorded dividend and capital gains income. Such a strategy pandered to the majority of Americans who don’t believe they are “rich,” but fall into the great “middle class” which the politicians claimed they were protecting. In the meantime, those very politicians have deferred dealing with the real issue that is out of...

In its monthly statement for December, released Friday, the U.S. Treasury says the federal government balanced its budget during the month, bringing in roughly $270 billion in revenues while making roughly $270 billion in expenditures. Yet, the Treasury also says that during December it increased by $63.079 billion the national debt subject to the statutory legal limit set by Congress, thus dramatically bringing the debt to the legal limit on Dec. 31, just as Congress and the White House were involved in final negotiations on a deal to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff”—which would have canceled all of the lower...

With the fiscal cliff deal and many Obamacare taxes taking effect, Americans will be slammed with an estimated $264 billion in new taxes this year alone—making 2013 memorable for delivering one of the largest one-year tax increases in American history. The math breakdown of the new taxes is simple: Key parts of the Bush tax cuts will expire as a result of the new fiscal cliff legislation, hitting American taxpayers with a tax bill of about $39.5 billion each year for the next decade. … Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi issued a projection that the tax burden will cut GDP...

Government spending is the No. 1 problem in America, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he won’t rule out a government shutdown if President Barack Obama refuses to address the country’s growing fiscal woes. “We now have a debt the size of our economy, which makes us look a lot like Greece,” McConnell said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s a shame that the president doesn’t embrace the effort to reduce spending.” When host David Gregory asked McConnell about the debt ceiling, and whether Republicans would consider a government shutdown to force the issue of spending cuts, the...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday that she would raise the debt limit unilaterally “in a second” if she were president of the United States. Pelosi and other Democrats have suggested that the president could bypass Congress and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling by invoking the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.” … The next battle in Congress will be raising the debt ceiling, after the deal to avert the fiscal cliff failed to address the borrowing limit. President Obama said he “will not...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who reportedly will leave office at the end of this month, is already responsible for spending and borrowing more money than any of his predecessors as secretary of the Treasury. The U.S. Senate confirmed Geithner on Jan. 26, 2009. Between February 2009, the first full month of Geithner’s tenure, and the end of November 2012, the last full month for which federal spending records are available, the U.S. Treasury dispensed approximately $13.582319 trillion. …

Warren Buffett says he’s optimistic the nation’s debt problems will be solved, despite the political fighting that’s threatening to put the country over the “fiscal cliff.” … “The United States is richer than it’s ever been. We have $50,000 or so of GDP per person. But we’ve overpromised and we’ve also under taxed to some extent, so we find ourselves with this great fiscal imbalance. But it was man made. We’re a rich country. It can be solved. … We’ll be able to overcome this problem. America has faced a lot tougher problems than this one. We’ll get it solved.”...

John Boehner is a bloodied House speaker following the startling setback that his own fractious Republican troops dealt him in their “fiscal cliff” struggle against President Barack Obama. There’s plenty of internal grumbling about the Ohio Republican, especially among conservatives, and lots of buzzing about whether his leadership post is in jeopardy. But it’s uncertain whether any other House Republican has the broad appeal to seize the job from Boehner or whether his embarrassing inability to pass his own bill preventing tax increases on everyone but millionaires is enough to topple him. “No one will be challenging John Boehner as...

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) does not think it is “logical” to achieve a balanced federal budget “from the standpoint of a whole economy” because the relationship between budget and government is different from that of budget and individual. At the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, CNSNews.com asked Frank about the “fiscal cliff” talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio): “During these ongoing negotiations would you like to see an attempt to balance the federal budget? And if so,in what year?” …

A new and extensive analysis of 2.4 million loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration in recent years shows a pattern of risky lending that could generate $20 billion in losses and harm thousands of the nation’s most vulnerable borrowers. By ignoring risks in loans it insured in 2009 and 2010, the study concludes, the F.H.A. is imperiling both borrowers and taxpayers who stand behind the agency. The analysis emerged less than a month after the F.H.A.’s auditor submitted a troubling report on the financial soundness of its insurance fund. In mid-November, the auditor estimated that the fund, which backs...

President Barack Obama is not ready to accept a new offer from the Republican leader of the U.S. House of Representatives to raise taxes on top earners in exchange for major cuts in entitlement programs, a source said late on Saturday. The shape and details of Boehner’s offer were uncertain Saturday night, as was the exact reason the president was prepared to reject it. … Tax rates and entitlements are the two most difficult issues in the so-far unproductive negotiations to avert the “fiscal cliff” of steep tax hikes and spending cuts set for the new year unless Congress and...

Former presidential hopeful, Steve Forbes said he believes Republicans would be best served postponing “everything” before passing any laws to avoid the looming fiscal cliff. “Just say everything stays the same for another three months, six months because early next year it will be apparent that doing harm to this economy is not going to be a smart thing to do,” Forbes said in an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV. “The president hopes to ram this through before the shakiness of the economy becomes evident to the voters.” …

The failure of Democrats and Republicans to break the impasse over the “fiscal cliff” is raising the possibility of Congress going beyond the year-end deadline to complete the work necessary to avert steep tax hikes and budget cuts that experts fear could push the nation into another recession. A top Democrat in the House of Representatives said if the two sides agreed in principle on a deal but ran out of time to draft and pass the legislation implementing it, Congress could pass a temporary measure and work out the details in the following weeks. Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland,...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said what she views as optimistic market data is a sign that investors believe an agreement to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” will be reached, that the markets “trust that we would not be so stupid as to go over the cliff.” At a Capitol Hill press conference on Thursday, Pelosi said, “If we agree that we will have a solution and that we will avoid the cliff—I think we all should agree to that—then what are the steps we need to take and how quickly can we take them, so that we at...

Contrary to popular opinion, U.S. tax rates aren’t low, says Edward Prescott, a Nobel laureate economist at Arizona State University. “Tax rates are already high, much higher than is commonly understood, and increasing them will likely further depress the economy, especially by affecting the number of hours Americans work,” Prescott and Lee Ohanian, a UCLA economist, write in The Wall Street Journal. …

During a press conference to unveil some 160,000 individual petitions asking Congress not to raise taxes on any Americans, organizers were asked if House Speaker John Boehner was invited to attend. “Speaker Boehner was invited. Other members of leadership were invited,” said Dustin Stockton, chief strategist with TheTeaParty.net, the group that organized the petition drive. … “But then he (Boehner) didn’t want to attend this?” CNSNews.com asked. “No,” Stockton said. …

House conservatives believe there is no good proposal put forth by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) or President Obama to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” and blame for the current Republican position “rests squarely” on Boehner’s shoulders. “Let’s do something that’s real unusual in this town. Let’s talk about accountability. I don’t care whoever you are. The position the speaker’s in right now—if there’s any blame to be placed, it’s squarely on his shoulders,” said Rep. Jeff Landry (R-La.). … “There’s no deal on the table from either side that is a good deal for the American people. Not one...

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Budget Committee, tells Newsmax he will refuse to approve an increase in the debt ceiling unless a deal is reached on major entitlement reform—and he is convinced House Speaker John Boehner will refuse as well. The South Carolina Republican also says President Obama should “man up” and create a lasting legacy by saving Medicare and Social Security with those reforms. And he insists defense spending should not suffer significant new cuts because “there is no Social Security without national security.” …

There are limits to how much aid the Federal Reserve can provide to the U.S. economy, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned on Wednesday as he urged politicians to tackle a year-end fiscal cliff that could derail the country’s gradual recovery. … The U.S. central bank announced it would keep buying $85 billion of Treasury and mortgage-backed bonds a month until it saw a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market. Its balance sheet would increase to almost $4 trillion by the end of next year if it kept up that pace of purchases. … Critics of the central...

The United States needs a balanced, comprehensive approach to tackle its fiscal woes that should include a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases, the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Sunday. “My view, personally, is that the best way to go forward is to have a balanced approach that takes into account both increasing the revenue, which means, you know, either raising taxes or creating new sources of revenue, and cutting spending,” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in a pre-taped interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” which aired on Sunday. …

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he would have to have a “real serious conversation” with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke before he considers bringing the Federal Reserve Transparency Act to the Senate Floor. On July 25, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2012 (HR 459), also commonly known as the “Audit the Fed” bill sponsored by retiring Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), in a 327-98 vote and has been received in the Senate. The Senate version of the bill, S.202, is stuck in the Senate. … As CNSNews.com previously reported, Reid was once a...

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) said no progress has been made with the White House in talks to avert the so-called fiscal cliff: across-the-board tax-rate hikes and automatic spending cuts (sequestration) at the beginning of the new year. “This isn’t a progress report because there’s no progress to report,” Boehner said during a Capitol Hill press conference on Friday. “When it comes to the fiscal cliff that is threatening our economy and threatening jobs, the White House has wasted another week.” …

Hillary Clinton is among the most popular politicians nationwide and is the clear choice for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, according to recent polling data. A new poll released by Public Policy Polling found 51 percent of respondents have a favorable view of Hillary Clinton, while 29 percent view her unfavorably. On the Republican side, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie received a 48 percent favorability rating, with 26 percent of respondents viewing him unfavorably. …